Friday, October 31, 2014

In the wake of protests of declining enrollment and cuts in campus
services, the president of Virginia State University, Keith T. Miller,
will resign at the end of December, the Richmond Times-Dispatchreports.
The announcement followed a three-hour, closed-session meeting of the
historically black university’s Board of Visitors. Harry Black, the
board’s rector, reported the change, saying the college “should move in
another direction strategically.”

A faculty member at the University of New Mexico’s law school said
she would cut ties with the institution in protest against a decision by
its president to honor the governor little more than a week before the
election, the Albuquerque Journal reports.
The professor, Maureen A. Sanders, worked full time for 10 years and
now teaches as an adjunct faculty member. She is also a longtime donor
to the university.
She said she was troubled by President Robert G. Frank’s choice to
select Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, for a presidential award of
distinction so close to the election.
Ms. Sanders said she disagreed with the president that Ms. Martinez
has been good for the health of the state’s residents, and said the
honor was inappropriate.

Faculty at the University of Iowa are bothered that their president
publicly backed a plan to cut the university’s budget by nearly $50
million.
Privately, some faculty were horrified by seeing President Sally Mason’s signature on the letter endorsing cuts to the university.
Other professors understood that Mason may have signed the letter at
the insistence of the state university system's Board of Regents.
The letter asks the legislature to adopt a new funding model that
would eventually take money from the University of Iowa’s and give it to
other public universities in the state.
Mason signed the letter along with the presidents of those other two
universities – Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa
– and two leaders from the state system, which created and approved the
plan. According to the letter, which is dated Oct. 14 but was made
public this week, the University of Iowa may lose about $46 million in
coming years, while Northern Iowa would gain $24 million and Iowa State
would get $23 million.

A college can’t fire an adjunct professor for criticizing it, so long
as the issues raised are matters of public concern and the adjunct has
reasonable expectation of continued employment, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Thursday in a decision regarding Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois.
Adjuncts historically have struggled to find legal support when they
suddenly lose their teaching assignments, and the appeals court decision
represents a strong statement that they have First Amendment rights and
that their grievances are significant matters of public policy.
With its decision, the appeals court reversed an earlier, lower court’s decision
that Moraine Valley was within its rights to terminate Robin Meade, an
adjunct professor of business and president of the American Federation
of Teachers-affiliated Moraine Valley Adjunct Faculty Organization, for
writing an unflattering letter about the college to an international
community college group.

Battles over funding and college costs are being fought in races for governor across the country.
These state races are likelier to have a more immediate effect than
much of what Congress or the Obama administration may do. States, after
all, are spending about $72 billion a year on higher education.
Often enough – perhaps because it’s easiest to talk about in sound
bites and gets the attention of key voting blocs – tuition prices are
the main higher education-related topic.
Incumbents in Iowa, Wisconsin and California have talked about
tuition freezes. In Georgia, a challenger and the incumbent are sparring
over who would best protect the state’s prized HOPE scholarship. In
Maine, a Democrat wants to give every public college student a free
sophomore year.
Other candidates get further into the weeds with talk of
accountability and performance funding, though that’s mostly in their
written campaign platforms and white papers, or when higher education
comes up in debates.
In Florida, a tight gubernatorial race has included a back-and-forth battle over who can claim pro-higher-education bragging rights.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the First Amendment protected
an adjunct instructor’s public complaints about how her employer, an
Illinois community college, deals with people in her position.
In a decision
handed down on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Seventh Circuit unanimously held that the First
Amendment precluded Moraine Valley Community College from firing Robin
Meade, a part-time business instructor and adjunct-union head, for
telling an international organization that her college mistreats
adjuncts in ways that hurt students’ education.
The sort of retaliation alleged in Ms. Meade’s lawsuit is a common
fear among adjunct instructors, who lack tenure and, at most colleges,
can be removed simply by being denied work in the future. Such
retaliation appears especially likely to be directed at adjunct instructors with union-leadership positions,
which put them at odds with administrators. At the time of her
dismissal, in August 2013, Ms. Meade had been president of the Moraine
Valley Adjunct Faculty Organization, a union affiliated with the
American Federation of Teachers.

Academics have debunked fears of a zombie outbreak. But that certainly hasn’t stopped them from planning for one.
In 2009 a Canadian research team published
a mathematical model for how a zombie virus might spread and what
governments would have to do in order to stop it. A few years later, a
pair of U.S. researchers expanded on that work and demonstrated how similar modeling techniques could be used to predict the spread of influenza.
This is the context of most zombie-related research: trying to better
understand how actual diseases spread. And in a world where people are
suggestible to zombie hoaxes
any time a scary illness like Ebola is in the news, it makes sense to
try to harness that pop-culture fetish in the service of educating
people.
But feeding people’s appetite for zombie scenarios can be a tricky
science. When serious researchers talk about zombies with anything
resembling a straight face, misunderstandings can spread through the
public imagination faster than scientists can contain them.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Bergen Community College may have violated a professor’s constitutional
rights in January when it sanctioned him for posting a photo online of
his daughter wearing a “Game of Thrones” T-shirt that read, “I will take
what is mine with fire & blood,” the college said in a letter to
him.
The Sept. 29 letter to Francis Schmidt, an art and 3-D animation
professor, was posted online Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education. The foundation helped Schmidt secure a lawyer.
Schmidt posted the picture of his daughter on Jan. 12 on Google+,
sharing it with his social media contacts, one of whom was a dean at the
college. He said he was called before college officials the next day,
who questioned him to determine if the photo represented a threat
against the dean.

A community college has admitted that it may have violated a
professor’s constitutional rights when it suspended him for posting a
photograph of a shirt featuring a quotation from the popular HBO
television series Game of Thrones,reportsThe Record, a New Jersey newspaper.
Bergen Community College suspended Francis Schmidt, an art and
animation professor, after he posted the photo, which shows his
daughter, on Google+ in January. The quote on her T-shirt—“I will take
what is mine with fire & blood”—apparently alarmed a dean at the
college.

Twenty-eight percent of public four-year college and university
presidents say they feel pressure from their governors to conduct their
presidencies in ways that differ from their judgment about what's best
for their institutions.
That is among the findings of the latest snap poll of presidents -- conducted by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed
-- on breaking issues. A total of 620 presidents responded to the
latest survey. They were assured anonymity, but their answers were
grouped by sector. The latest survey was conducted amid the latest push
by allies of Texas Governor Rick Perry to force out Bill Powers as
president of the University of Texas at Austin, and amid growing debate
over the use of climate surveys as one tool to combat sexual assault on
campuses. (Powers survived, but in part because he was agreeing to retire anyway, just on his schedule instead of the governor's.)
The results showed that a considerable minority of public university
presidents (but very few private college presidents, who typically have
less interaction with state politicians) appear to have a tough
balancing act with respect to their governors. And the results showed
mixed feelings about climate surveys.

Predictions made in 2012 that MOOCs would totally disrupt the existing
higher education model were certainly exaggerated. But that does not
mean that MOOCs won’t have an profound impact on the future of higher
education.

As Bill Gates once said, “We always overestimate the change that will
occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur
in the next 10.”

MOOCS played a historic role in stimulating discussion in teaching
across the academy. MOOCs engaged faculty and gave new legitimation to
online education.

MOOCs also provided an experimental space where content specialists,
instructional designers, and educational technologists could test new
pedagogies and teaching tools including auto-grading, interactive
simulations, and educational gaming,

For the most part, however, MOOCs today have not evolved significantly
in approach beyond those available in 2012. If next generation MOOCs are
to appear, they will need to draw upon the experience of online
retailers, journalism, online dating services, and social networking
sites.

Here are ten challenges facing MOOCs and lessons they might learn from the commercial world.

The academic life, even a “successful” one, is a life filled with
rejection. We are rejected from some of the colleges we apply to as high
school students, as well as some of the universities where we apply to
undertake graduate study. When we graduate yet again and seek academic
appointments, rejection becomes an ever-present force as never before,
so common in fact that the employers rejecting us have pre-prepared form
letters, which they often reuse from year to year, made up to deliver
the news, sending them out well beyond the day when we have already
realized that we didn’t get the job.
Even after we are installed in an academic appointment, of any
variety, rejection is as present and real as ever. When it comes to
publishing, even top scholars quickly become reacquainted with
rejection, as it is a routine part of the effort to publish scholarly
work. Rejection of academics includes students who refuse to engage our
courses, never responding to our methods. Rejection is a phenomenon
that confronts all teacher-scholars.

When
massive open online courses first grabbed the spotlight in 2011, many
saw in them promise of a revolutionary force that would disrupt
traditional higher education by expanding access and reducing costs. The
hope was that MOOCs — classes from elite universities, most of them
free, in some cases enrolling hundreds of thousands of students each —
would make it possible for anyone to acquire an education, from a
villager in Turkey to a college dropout in the United States.

Following the “hype cycle” model
for new technology products developed by the Gartner research group,
MOOCs have fallen from their “peak of inflated expectations” in 2012 to
the “trough of disillusionment.”

There
are several reasons for the disillusionment. First, the average student
in a MOOC is not a Turkish villager with no other access to higher
education but a young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a
full-time job.

Many educators and scholars, in
essays like this one, have already denounced the “do
what you love” mantra (or, as its known in its abbreviated form, DWYL). Miya Tokumitsu criticized it as an elitist battle
cry and a classist whisper.

The objections raised in those
essays may appeal to leftists who abhor the idea of a world in which we all
walk around grinning and saying “I love my job.” They question the expectation
that work should be a source of pleasure. But the idea that work is inherently
displeasing -- or provides the worker disutility (to borrow a phrase
from classical political economist Jeremy Bentham and from microeconomics
textbooks everywhere) -- is equally troubling.

Many educators and scholars, in essays like this one, have already denounced the “do what you love” mantra (or, as its known in its abbreviated form, DWYL). Miya Tokumitsu criticized it as an elitist battle cry and a classist whisper.
The objections raised in those essays may appeal to leftists who
abhor the idea of a world in which we all walk around grinning and
saying “I love my job.” They question the expectation that work should
be a source of pleasure. But the idea that work is inherently
displeasing -- or provides the worker disutility (to borrow a
phrase from classical political economist Jeremy Bentham and from
microeconomics textbooks everywhere) -- is equally troubling.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/781-working-out-the-meaning-of-meaningful-work#sthash.yaxJ9SbA.dpuf

The U.S. Department of Education released the full text
of its final gainful-employment rule on Thursday morning, and it’s a
big one, weighing in at 945 pages. But sheer volume has never been
enough to discourage the most devoted of higher-education observers: the
diehard policy wonks, who took to Twitter with observations and
analysis.
The biggest change, as The Chronicle’s Kelly Field noted,
is the elimination of cohort default rates as a measure that
career-education programs will be subject to, leaving the
debt-to-earnings ratio as the sole metric. It’s a win for community
colleges, which had protested the use of default rates. Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, posed the simple question: Why the change?

To hear UNCG talk about it, times are tough. The university cut 150 positions this summer to trim $12.8 million from its budget.
Since 2008, UNCG has seen roughly $110 million in budget cuts.
Considering the university's annual budget is in the ballpark of $360
million, those cuts hurt.But an accounting
professor from Michigan has a different take on this year's budget cuts:
"Did they need to cut $12 million last year? No way."

The accounting professor is a guy named Howard Bunsis,
who teaches at Eastern Michigan University and is active in AAUP, the
nationwide group of university professors. UNCG faculty (its AAUP
chapter and Faculty Senate, to be precise), invited Bunsis to campus
Friday to talk about UNCG's budget.

The massive open online course craze may have subsided, but
the debate about the role of online courses in higher education
persists. Even as more faculty members experiment with online education,
they continue to fear that the record-high number of students taking
those classes are receiving an inferior experience to what can be
delivered in the classroom, Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests.

Gallup surveyed 2,799 faculty members and 288 academic
technology administrators this August and September on issues identified
by Inside Higher Ed. A copy of the report can be downloaded here.

Prosecutors have agreed to drop felony charges against three former
employees of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who were
fired for allegedly using university equipment to operate a freelance
photography business. The firings sparked faculty unrest over the treatment of the three, who worked in university relations.
Two photographers, Chris English and David Wilson, will see their
charges dropped in six months if they each pay restitution to the
university and complete 40 hours of community service. Lyda Carpen, who
supervised them, saw all charges against her dropped.

A joint letter
from the presidents of Stanford University and Dartmouth College will
be sent to nearly 100,000 Montana voters to apologize for an experiment
by three political-science professors at the two institutions. The
letter comes after voters and state officials objected to a mailer, sent
by the professors, that featured the state’s official seal and offered
information about the political leanings of candidates for the state’s
Supreme Court as part of an attempt to see whether such information
would alter how Montanans voted.
The experiment has been condemned by other researchers in the field
as unwise and perhaps unethical. Theda Skocpol, a professor of
government and sociology at Harvard University, told Talking Points Memo that the research struck her as a "lapse in judgment."
The apology letter, which will cost the universities around $50,000
to send out, asks voters to ignore the mailer and states that "no
research study should risk disrupting an election."
Which should go without saying, but in this case apparently had to be said.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

David A. Thomas wrote the book on how to get an executive-level job if
you’re an African-American man. Mr. Thomas is dean of the McDonough
School of Business at Georgetown University. Earlier in his career, he
spent four years at the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania, followed by 21 years at Harvard Business School as a
professor and associate dean. He holds a Ph.D. in organizational
psychology from Yale University.
As he built that career, Mr. Thomas had a template to follow: his own research. His 1999 book, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America,
written with John J. Gabarro, compared the trajectories of minority
employees with those of white employees, looking for differences in
success patterns and other factors that help make or break careers.

Cities and colleges are more alike than people think. Both are
considered economic engines that also offer rites of passage and an
escape from parochialism. Both host sports teams and their own police
forces. Recently the overwhelming debts run up by cities and by students
have forced themselves on the public’s attention. Yet despite the
significant woes of Detroit and the impending bankruptcies of other
American cities, no one is expecting urban living to disappear or be
radically transformed. Higher education, however, is not so lucky.
Some doomsayers
predict the rise of a completely online educational system, spurred by
the spread of massive open online courses. Telecommuting did not destroy
cities, but many fear it will do so to colleges.
In the 1970s, some critics thought that cities were finished. There
was nothing you could get in a city that could not be found in a suburb,
at least nothing you would want. With the advent of telecommuting in
the 90s, even Bill Gates championed
a new exurban existence. Home offices would replace office buildings
just as shopping malls replaced downtown department stores.

A recent Faculty Senate vote on a
departmental restructuring at my university got my attention even before the
debate turned contentious. The restructuring proposal seemed completely
practical and straightforward to me (I’ll spare you the details as they are
only of interest internally). Asked for my advice before the vote, I encouraged
a colleague supportive of the proposal to engage in extensive conversation
before it hit the Senate floor. And, most important: I suggested making a
special effort to communicate with those Senate members known for being
especially suspicious about change.

“The rationale makes sense,” I said,
“you just need to make sure everyone understands why this would be beneficial.”

The organizers secured the support
of Senate leadership in advance of the meeting, but they neglected to “educate”
the other members of the Senate. The issue was put before the membership cold
and it was not received warmly. While an adequate number of votes was
eventually secured, the process to achieve that was painful and protracted.
“Line up the votes before you get in the room” -- Rule No. 12 of The
Academic Organizational Politics Playbook -- was broken that day. The
Academic Organizational Politics Playbook does not actually exist, but if
it did, it would contain a full chapter on how to ensure that no debate of
significance occurs inside formal meetings.

A
recent Faculty Senate vote on a departmental restructuring at my
university got my attention even before the debate turned contentious.
The restructuring proposal seemed completely practical and
straightforward to me (I’ll spare you the details as they are only of
interest internally). Asked for my advice before the vote, I encouraged a
colleague supportive of the proposal to engage in extensive
conversation before it hit the Senate floor. And, most important: I
suggested making a special effort to communicate with those Senate
members known for being especially suspicious about change.
“The rationale makes sense,” I said, “you just need to make sure everyone understands why this would be beneficial.”
The organizers secured the support of Senate leadership in advance
of the meeting, but they neglected to “educate” the other members of the
Senate. The issue was put before the membership cold and it was not
received warmly. While an adequate number of votes was eventually
secured, the process to achieve that was painful and protracted. “Line
up the votes before you get in the room” -- Rule No. 12 of The Academic Organizational Politics Playbook -- was broken that day. The Academic Organizational Politics Playbook
does not actually exist, but if it did, it would contain a full chapter
on how to ensure that no debate of significance occurs inside formal
meetings.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/774-you-don-t-do-politics#sthash.TXVFyGuW.dpuf

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently released the findings of a detailed investigation into “irregular” classes run through the African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department.
For those, like me, who proudly call themselves Tar Heels, the
investigation provided plenty of disappointments: Students received
credit for courses that never met and papers filled with unoriginal
text. Support staff connected to university athletics—evidently aware
that certain AFAM classes had inexcusably low standards and offered a
way to inflate GPAs—shepherded students to those classes. One email from
an academic counselor seemed to express indifference to student
plagiarism—an astonishing breach of academic integrity.
Upsetting though these findings are, they are not what saddened me
the most. The most disturbing revelation was the number of students who
partook in the “paper” classes: at least 3,100.

Back-to-school isn’t just for kids.
At Labor Notes we’re jumping into Troublemaker School season—which kicked off
in Gainesville, Florida, where 50 troublemakers learned how to conduct open
bargaining, how to build a community coalition to fight wage theft, and even
what makes a good union meeting.

Troublemakers Schools are lined up
in San Diego,
Halifax, Vermont, and D.C. this fall, with more planned in 2015. But
that’s not the only place we’re forging savvier troublemakers.

Our new Labor Notes Associates
program sends experienced labor educators out to local unions for tailored
workshops and ongoing coaching. The goal: strengthening members’ skills for
workplace fights.

Back-to-school
isn’t just for kids. At Labor Notes we’re jumping into Troublemaker
School season—which kicked off in Gainesville, Florida, where 50
troublemakers learned how to conduct open bargaining, how to build a
community coalition to fight wage theft, and even what makes a good
union meeting.
Troublemakers Schools are lined up in San Diego, Halifax, Vermont, and D.C. this fall, with more planned in 2015. But that’s not the only place we’re forging savvier troublemakers.
Our new Labor Notes Associates program sends experienced labor
educators out to local unions for tailored workshops and ongoing
coaching. The goal: strengthening members’ skills for workplace fights.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2014/10/trainings-take#sthash.a8EWu6d7.dpuf

Jim Catanzaro, the longtime president of Chattanooga State Community College, met Lisa Haynes, now a top aide, in Barbados.
He later hired Haynes, a native of the island nation, for a newly
created job. At the time, she didn't have a college degree. Then he
bumped her pay up to $108,000 this year. Now, roughly a third of the
college's faculty have backed a no confidence vote in Catanzaro’s
leadership and the hiring has drawn scrutiny from state higher education
regulators.
Catanzaro, who has been president of the 13,000-student community
college in Tennessee for 25 years as of Nov. 1, said he met Haynes while
he was visiting the island nation.
Haynes, he said, thought she had graduated from Duquesne University with a marketing degree in 2005.
She applied for one job -- associate vice president for fund
development -- and didn’t get it, Catanzaro said. Then she applied for
another, senior executive assistant to Catanzaro. She got that job. But
when she was hired last fall, she had not actually been awarded her
degree by Duquesne. Now, she also has another title: chief innovations
officer.

A group of Washington University adjunct instructors have taken a crucial step toward forming a union.
The
Service Employees International Union Local 1 has filed a petition for a
union election with the federal government on the instructors’ behalf.

The
petition makes Washington University’s adjunct faculty the first such
group in St. Louis to reach that milestone amid a larger nationwide push
for higher pay and improved job security.

Service Employees International Union launched its Adjunct Action campaign less
than two years ago, with an ambitious goal: take SEIU's metro-wide
adjunct organizing effort in Washington, D.C. -- which took years to
establish -- national, and fast. Drives were soon happening from Boston
to San Francisco, leading to a dozen new unions.
Now Adjunct Action is touting its first successful contract
negotiation, and adjuncts at Tufts University outside Boston are saying
it could serve a model for the many contract negotiations happening
elsewhere.
Highlights include significant pay increases, longer-term contracts
and -- perhaps most meaningfully -- the right to be interviewed for
full-time positions in one’s department.

Competency-based education is going upmarket. Three brand-name, Big
Ten-affiliated institutions are now offering degrees in this emerging
form of higher education.
Yet the new programs at the University of Michigan, Purdue University
and the University of Wisconsin System are not aimed at the vast
numbers of undergraduates who come to those campuses for the traditional
college experience. They are narrow in scope, experimental and not all
that sexy
The Wisconsin System’s “Flexible Option” is the most extensive and established of the programs. Its five competency-based, online credentials,
which range from a certificate to bachelor’s degrees, are designed
mostly for adult students with some college credits but no degree. And
they are offered by the system’s two-year institutions, its extension
program, and the Milwaukee campus -- not the Madison campus with the
lake and the 80,000-seat Camp Randall Stadium.